Beyond Standardization

REDEFINING LEARNING BEYOND ADVANCED PLACEMENT TESTS

Archer’s decision to remove APs was A paradigm shift towards learning that embraces creativity and limitless growth, yielding remarkable success. Breaking free from standardized testing, Archer’s innovative approach paved the way for one of its most successful years to date.

WORDS BY SARAH RAFIQI

Advanced Placement (AP) courses were a cornerstone of my high school education. My class schedule was replete with AP courses in all core academic disciplines. These classes culminated in standardized exams at the end of each year, whose results would determine if I would receive credits toward college. Countless hours and innumerable flash cards were spent in pursuit of that goal. On sleepless nights I told myself it would all be worth it when I would walk at graduation with special distinction.

I ultimately did meet that goal, and several years later I joined The Archer School for Girls as a staff member. Many things have stayed the same since my high school days—Taylor Swift and Harry Styles are still wildly popular—however, many other things have changed. Most notably, I was surprised to learn that at Archer, AP courses are a thing of the past. It was difficult for me to imagine what the coursework would look like without Free Response Question (FRQ) practice sets and other AP test prep. I wondered: how could Archer provide a challenging curriculum without APs as a marker of success?

While I settled into my new role, so began my journey of understanding the rollback of Advanced Placement at Archer and the implementation of Advanced Study in its place. This journey took me all the way back to 2012, when discussions of evolving beyond Advanced Placement tests first started at Archer.

In 2012, then Dean of Students Gretchen Warner, headed an AP Task Force to evaluate how the Advanced Placement program—which has been run by College Board since 1955—fits into Archer’s overall mission and curriculum philosophy. Archer’s task force was a collection of multiple focus groups that conducted research over the span of a decade, and contributors were asked to consider what effective teachers and a strong curriculum would look like, as well as how that all came together with what students were doing and thinking.

The AP discussion at Archer was not happening in a vacuum. Across the country, hundreds of schools had been moving away from Advanced Placement for years. Archer’s History Department Chair, Bethany Neubauer, experienced this shift as a history teacher at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, which dropped APs in 2001, over ten years before similar conversations started at Archer.

Meanwhile, Archer’s Science department made the unilateral decision to remove AP courses from their curriculum in 2012. Hanna Robertson, Science Department Chair and Honors Research in Science Coordinator, remembers the decision was driven by a desire to prepare students for college science classes. As someone who herself conducted scientific research in college, Robertson saw a disconnect between the AP curriculum and what would be asked of students in higher education. “We wanted to prioritize teaching students to do science, over teaching students about science,” she said.

An Honors Research in Science class had previously been developed to meet this goal, but students were hesitant to take it. Robertson notes that “one of the biggest challenges for us in getting [Honors Research] started was that when it was offered at the same time as APs, students were choosing to take the AP because that’s what they thought colleges wanted.” I was immediately reminded of the college guidance advice I had received in high school: to take as many APs as possible to stand out as an applicant. By removing the option of the AP, more Archer students became interested in the Honors Research program—now Advanced Study Research in Science—and that program was able to grow. In the Class of 2012, 27% of alumni have attained degrees in STEM disciplines. Among the Class of 2023, 35% are going on to pursue STEM degrees. The success of Archer’s Honors Research in Science program inadvertently served as a test subject for the future of advanced courses at Archer.

English Department Chair Brian Wogensen remarks that the success of our STEM students—both in college and the dynamism of their research—helped the task force think about how a roll back of APs could look schoolwide. In History and English, they started to build in some honors seminar courses that were parallel with AP. These seminars became an early testing ground for how curricula could be dynamic. Wogensen describes it as a kind of “petri dish” that became really successful in how students responded to it. In his opinion, the English and History departments had a real balance between the students who took the AP and honors courses, and colleges saw them as equal.

In 2017, Archer finally made the move to replace AP US History (APUSH) and replace it with Honors US History. Wogensen believed the decision was made because “that particular AP exam was really content-driven and less in line with our academic philosophy, strategic plan in terms of academics, and our mission.” I couldn’t help but harken back to my own days in APUSH, struggling under the weight of summarizing one textbook chapter every two days. The course’s punishing pace adversely impacted my sleep schedule and ability to study for other classes. I can only imagine that if I had not felt compelled to take APUSH, I would have had greater school-life balance and been more academically well-rounded.

For Wogensen, the changes were all in service of what would be most academically enriching to Archer students. What he saw as the limitations of the AP courses was a restriction on the teachers in terms of how they were assessing students. “You’re really constricted in the sense that the AP exam is three, 40 minute inclass essays… That’s a great skill [to be able to do that kind of test] and we still teach that skill. But there’s a lot of other skills and avenues for scholarship that we weren’t able to fully embrace.” When I think about the skills I learned in APUSH—memorization and bulk note-taking—I wish I also had the chance to draw my own connections and engage more deeply with the material.

Neubauer echoes this sentiment as a past AP reader. After three years of AP reading, she felt “frustrated because [a student could] show they had deep knowledge of the overarching course content but not meet the criteria on the rubric and therefore not score very well [on the AP exam].”

Starting in the winter of 2018-2019, the AP task force held a focus group that delved into the outcomes from Honors Research in Science, Honors US History, and other schools who had moved away from AP. The focus group also analyzed data from surveys, questionnaires, and standardized testing data sets. Results from these sources found that schools that moved away from testdriven APs were able to build their own inquiry-driven, purposebased learning opportunities tailored to student interests.

Ultimately, the task force found that APs were not in line with Archer’s mission to “engage in a purposeful, inquiry-driven curriculum that fosters critical thinking and life-long intellectual curiosity.” After a decade of careful consideration, a final recommendation had been made: Archer as a whole should move away from Advanced Placement.

It was in 2022 that Archer’s vision to evolve beyond Advanced Placement was realized. Across subjects, the challenge of creating a new curriculum was tasked to faculty. Wogensen thinks of it fondly, noting, “Archer’s faculty is an incredibly generative, dynamic, creative group, and so that challenge was thrilling for us.”

He remembered that in the early days, Chairs across the school would meet to see if we could have a unified approach to creating a school-wide system of Advanced Study. It was a process of finding a balance between giving each course the agency to have specific assessments while also maintaining standardization within the Advanced Study program.

I sat down with representatives of each department to hear their pedagogical approaches to developing an Advanced Study curriculum. In some ways, the shift was department-specific in its application. Some departments, such as History and English, relished departing from the AP framework to create an engaging new curriculum. Others, such as World Languages, remained close to the AP curriculum because it hit many of their markers for achievement. However, they still greeted this new change as an invitation to personalize and adapt their lesson plans.

World Languages Department Chair Dr. Travis Nesbitt said, “The first year out, we essentially taught the AP course just under a different name. But it was through doing that that we realized that maybe there were better ways to engage the students.” In lieu of AP’s stiff testing modules, the World Languages department incorporated more authentic ways to teach and assess global competency. This year, students interacted with native speakers around themes of environmental or social justice, wrote letters to foreign language newspapers, and Zoomed or Skyped with students from foreign countries. It was a far cry from the pre-recorded conversation tapes of my youth. As a result, teachers have seen greater engagement in their students and a dissipation of drop off in class enrollment. Ultimately, the department found it liberating to be able to pick and choose what worked from the AP curriculum.

Still, this does not mean the shift has come without challenges. One specific benefit of the AP tests is that they are longitudinally assessed across schools. However, Nesbitt says we do not have to rely on College Board for these kinds of assessments. World Languages is looking to fill the void by using the standardized assessments offered by ACTFL, the American Council of Teachers for Foreign Languages, as well as exams and certificate programs from the French and Spanish governments.

Archer’s Math department has similarly looked outward for curricular inspiration. They pulled practice sets from CPM, a student-centered collaborative learning curriculum, for 6th grade through Calculus. Math Department Chair Maggie Cenan said one of the students’ favorite projects was from CPM, which is an opportunity we would not have had if we stayed with AP.

The unique dilemma for math was that AP Calculus had long stood as a pillar of what was required for students to be competitive in college. However, Cenan’s mindset was shifted when she attended the California Mathematics Council (CMC) South Conference in November 2021, where four different professors from various University of California schools came together to determine computer science as an alternative that would be regarded as equal in rigor to calculus. This was a watershed moment for Cenan. “The big thing for math is always like ‘I need calc so I can get into college’ but that’s not necessarily true because these colleges came together and shared that. So that was a huge motivator for myself.” Like the World Languages department, the Math department has not moved away from the AP requirements, but have simply allowed themselves to not be limited by them. “We’ve been able to add to the curriculum because we are not teaching to a test anymore,” Cenan remarks. “So that slight difference has actually given the students more opportunities to be exposed to different topics… We can add in more complex questions actually. Because we know that they’re not necessarily covered on the AP test, but they could be covered in the next college class.” Cenan believes the pacing is now better for the students as the courses are able to meet them where they are. Students are still able to take the AP Calculus test if it is individually beneficial for their college applications, but that is no longer the be-all, end-all of the math curriculum.

Throughout my discussions, I couldn’t help but notice similarities across the board. All faculty members I spoke with mentioned a freedom that came with the shift away from APs. This freedom was noticed by students. Isabelle V. ’23 took two AP classes in the 2021-2022 school year and two Advanced Study seminars in the 2022-2023 school year. Of the Advanced Study courses she said, “It seems like the teachers are able to express themselves more through the curriculum and that makes them more excited to teach and that makes the classes more engaging overall.” Her humanities classes gave her the flexibility to research her passions, the Classics, but it was her math classes where she felt the greatest impact of the shift away from AP. “This year [12th grade] I noticed a huge difference in math, because going from 10th grade, when I was in honors math, to 11th grade AP… it felt more automated and not as genuine. Now that it’s Advanced Study math, it felt like more of a return to that 10th grade math style that wasn’t AP. More engaging, more collaboration with your peers, which was something that I missed out on in junior year.”

Marin T. ’23 similarly appreciated the liberty of the Advanced Study curriculum. After taking one AP in 20212022 and three Advanced Study seminars in the 2022-2023 school year, Marin said they “definitely preferred Advanced Study. It allowed the teacher(s) to have a lot more freedom, which hence allowed the students to have more freedom with what we did.” Marin also pointed out that the Advanced Study courses taught analytical skills, while AP was much more rhetorical. These analytical skills were often embodied in academic research, which was a new skillset to learn.

Marin relates their first experience of conducting academic research to “diving into the deep end.” They muse that “...at first it was terrifying, but once [my classmates and I] leaned into the discomfort of ‘oh, I can choose what I want for this,’ it was amazing.” Spaces where students were able to share their work with each other validated the importance of choice in Advanced Study. Marin says they particularly enjoyed attending the Archer Advanced Study Humanities Symposium and hearing what “wildly different topics” everybody was researching. “Nothing was similar to each other’s at all, so that was definitely really rewarding."

It was notable to me that neither student said they missed the AP curriculum, which perhaps signals a shift of mindset in younger generations. “I don’t think a test determines somebody’s intelligence. It doesn’t determine how well somebody understands a topic. Because… some people just aren’t good test takers,” Marin remarked. “I just don’t think it’s a good way to measure if somebody is comprehending a topic. So I think Advanced Study was a way to have that same rigor, but give people an outlet to actually express what they did understand without being in such a linear, boxed-in format.”

This notion is not isolated to Archer or its students. Colleges have seemed to embrace a similar philosophy. “Education is changing. Colleges are much more interested in interdisciplinary majors and students who can engage in academic work beyond a test. The AP tests are not designed for that. So there’s a reason why more and more colleges are actually not allowing students to use AP scores to pass out of classes,” said Ivan Hauck, Director of College Guidance at Archer. As someone who had myself used AP test scores to pass out of general education college credits, this came as a surprise and signaled a substantial shift in college admissions.

Hauck noted that for students who want to get ahead in credits, they still have the option to study for AP tests on their own or take community college classes over the summer, but that there’s a reason why colleges, even post-COVID, are staying test-optional. “They realized that standardized testing is such a limited way of understanding a student’s trajectory and ability. And the same thing for AP tests, so consequently they are looking for other ways of evaluation, whether it’s in teacher recommendations, or counselor recommendations, or personal stories and narratives,” said Hauck.

These personal narratives were bolstered by the independent nature of research in Advanced Study. Hauck says that by getting rid of APs, “it’s allowing us to differentiate students in a way that we have never been able to before.” “With the exponential rise in applications, colleges are trying to find ways of picking the unique students, both in academic interests and with social and emotional skills that are going to contribute to a holistic and diverse community.” By no longer offering APs, Archer had more opportunities to help each student stand out in really powerful and unique ways. Hauck believes this is one of the reasons Archer had multiple students admitted to many very impressive schools. “Even our students who were applying to the same schools were very unique in their ambitions and their interests and so there was rationale for why a college or university was able to select more Archer students,” he said.

As its name suggests, Advanced Placement was designed as a system to award high school students “advanced placement” in college. As that benefit dwindles, Archer has restructured our academic programs to emphasize “advanced study” skills. So not only has Advanced Study helped students get into college, it also seems to be preparing them well for it. Isabelle and Marin both felt that the Advanced Study curriculum was teaching them research skills that would serve them well in higher education. Marin noted that Advanced Study marked a good half-way point between middle school and college. “[Our teachers are] teaching us how to be independent, but we’re still being taught how to be independent rather than just throwing us in.” Isabelle felt that “the thesis, research paper idea is really helpful for seniors because that’s the thing that’s going to prepare me the most for college, especially as someone who wants to do humanities.”

This research experience seems to have already benefited our alumni. Hanna Robertson will never forget one student from the first year of the shift away from science APs who was the most vocal opponent against the move. This student told Robertson that she had always wanted to take AP Bio and felt that the opportunity had been taken away from her. In its absence, she was forced to take Honors Research in Science instead. “She came back years later to thank me, and to tell me that was one of the most pivotal courses in her career. She’s now a doctor,” Robertson said. As I heard this story, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own trajectory since high school and how different my discussion-based college courses felt from my more memorization-heavy high school classes. In fact, each interview and step on my journey of discovery led to a series of surprising self-reflections. More so than the differences, what really struck me was the similarities between my personal AP experiences and those at Archer. I couldn’t help but notice how little the AP system has changed, although the circumstances of the world and college admissions have transformed greatly. On the other hand, in the Advanced Study curriculum, I saw something not only more reflective of my college studies, but also a shadow of what my high school experience could have been. Unlike Isabelle, it never would have occurred to me to describe my high school math classes as “collaborative.” Nor did I have the opportunity to attend a symposium of my peers’ research like Marin. Perhaps I had missed something I didn’t know could exist: an agency and curiosity to guide my own education, rather than a series of checkboxes to mark on my path towards higher education.

From my many conversations, it seems that Advanced Study serves as a framework to push beyond those checkboxes. Crucial to this vision is that the curriculum remain dynamic. Archer faculty are in an ever constant effort to better the Advanced Study curriculum. How is it meeting student needs? How is it meeting the learning outcomes goals that we have? These are questions faculty grapple with when they survey student experiences and reflect together about what did and didn’t work throughout the year. The development of the Advanced Study curriculum is never complete, nor should it be. It is an iterative process that will learn year over year, and adapt as necessary. That is part of its design. Wogensen emphasizes “the importance of iteration and review and reflection so that the Advanced Study program isn’t just a structure that’s girded and solid.” Rather, it can evolve to meet the goals of an ever-changing education landscape and prepare modern-day students for the future.